All the Ways To Say I Love You ** C

Neil LaBute’s new play for MCC at the Lucille Lortel Theatre is really just an hour-long monologue for an actress on the far side of 50. But when that actress is Tony winner Judith Light, who’s going to complain about it? Light plays Mrs. Johnson, a long-time high school English teacher and counselor, looking back 15 years to a relationship that profoundly affected her marriage, her career and her soul. To say more would be to give away too much. Those expecting the usual dose of bile and surprise from LaBute will be disappointed. Light is impressive — just learning all those lines is amazing — but her performance is too often overheated with few quieter moments to relieve the intensity. Rachel Hauck’s set recreates a high school office convincingly. Emily Rebholz’s has dressed Light plausibly. I wish director Leigh Silverman had gone for a wider emotional palette. Running time: one hour, no intermissionion.

Summer Shorts - Series A ** C

The Festival of New American Short Plays is celebrating its 10th year with two series of three plays each at 59E59 Theater. The three plays in Series A, performed without intermission, last barely 80 minutes. 

“The Helpers” by Cusi Cram, presents two characters, a retired psychiatrist (Maggie Burke) and a former patient (David Deblinger), who meet on a bench in Greenwich Village on a cold winter day to settle some unfinished business. It’s a brief character sketch that doesn’t go very deep. The acting is adequate as is the direction by Jessi D. Hill.

Neil LaBute is back again this year with “After the Wedding,” in which a husband and wife (Frank Harts and Elizabeth Masucci) who have been married 5 or 6 years, face the audience in separate pools of light and engage in two overlapping monologues that start by relating amusing bits about their marriage but end up telling about a tragic event that occurred at the start of their honeymoon which they have tried hard to avoid thinking about. Since this is LaBute, there is some sexual content. The actors are convincing and Maira Mileaf’s direction is smooth. 

“This Is How It Ends” by A. Rey Pamatmat, by far the longest of the three plays, is an unwieldy absurdist look at the end of the world as seen by a gay man Jake (Chinaza Uche), Annie (Kerry Warren), the roommate he found on Craigslist  who reveals that she is really the Antichrist and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse — Death (Nadine Malouf), Famine (Rosa Gilmore), Pestilence (Sathya Sridharan) and War (Patrick Cummings). It turns out that the latter two are a downlow item. The plot is too disjointed to make much sense although director Ed Sylvanus Iskander (“The Mysteries” at The Flea) bravely tries.

The simple set by Rebecca Lord-Surratt features a back wall of louvred panels that swivel to reveal a smooth surface for projections on the reverse side. The costumes by Amy Sutton for the Four Horsemen are quite amusing. 

All in all, it was not a very satisying program. Before the first play, there was an interesting stop-motion short film of the crew assembling the set. The start was delayed for ten minutes by an argument over a seat between a man in a wheelchair and a woman with a walker that forced the house manager to intervene and got a round of applause from the audience when calm was restored. Would that the plays had been equally involving.

LaBute New Theater Festival **

St. Louis Actors’ Studio has produced this festival of one-act plays for the last three years with Neil LaBute serving on the selection jury and contributing one play each year. 59E59 Theater has brought six plays from the festival to New York. As with any such collection I have attended, the results are mixed. Of the six plays, only one and a half made a strong impression on me. 

“Stand up for Yourself” by British playwright Lexi Wolfe introduces us to the free-spirited 26-year-old Lila (Alicia Smith) who flirts with Lucas (Mark Ryan Anderson), a rather somber 42-year-old professor with a cane, at a London party. It’s a pity that the actors were saddled with less than successful British accents rather than just relocating the play to our shores. 

“Present Tense” by Peter Grandbois and Nancy Bell follows the difficult face-to-face encounter of an adulterous couple Debra (Jenny Smith) and Martin (Justin Ivan Brown) whose previous intimate relations have been via their laptops and cellphones. It is basically a sketch that wears out its welcome rapidly.

“Two Irishmen Are Digging a Ditch” by G.D. Kimble is awkwardly divided into two scenes. The first is an unnerving overheated monologue by the naked and battered Doyle (a powerful Anderson), an apparent victim of the Northern Irish troubles confronting his unseen captors. I wish the play had ended there. The second scene presents Hagerty (Brown) digging a ditch under the supervision of Evans (Neil Magnuson), a man in a lawn chair. Their connection and the relationship of the scene with the previous one ultimately become clear. For me, at least, it diminished rather than enhanced the force of the first half.

in “The Comeback Special” by JJ Strong, Bonnie (Alicia Smith) and Jesse (Michael Hogan) are a young couple visiting Graceland who slip into the master bedroom where they encounter none other than Elvis himself (Magnuson), who is trapped in a purgatory of sorts by the ignominious nature of his demise and requests the couple’s assistance to make his departure. It’s pretty slim.

“Coffee House, Greenwich Village” by John Doble is the setting for a blind date by Jack (Anderson) and Pamela (Jenny Smith), readers of the personals column in The New York Review of Books. Their attempts to find something in common lead off into the realm of fantasy and a rather drastic comeuppance for their annoying waiter (Brown). Nichols and May might have made something more entertaining out of this.

Last and best is LaBute’s contribution “Kandahar.” An unnamed soldier (Hogan) recently back from Afghanistan is sitting at a table facing us explaining the reasons for the violent crime he has just committed. In contrast to the emotional outburst in the monologue in Kimble’s play, LaBute’s character remains chillingly calm, which makes the situation all the more disturbing. Hogan is brilliant. I hope we will see more of him.

The production values are rather basic. Patrick Huber’s set design is simple in the extreme. The set changes between plays are a bit awkward, but are accompanied by musical selections that comment, sometimes amusingly, on the previous play. The costumes by Carla Evans are very good. Hogan and Anderson are standouts among the cast. Of the five new playwrights, I thought that G.D. Kimble showed the most promise. Directors Milton Zoth and John Pierson are unobtrusively effective. The evening had its moments, but they were relatively few. Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes including intermission.

Summer Shorts: Series A ***

59E59 Theater is once again hosting the Summer Shorts Festival of New American Short Plays. Series A features works by Neil LaBute (most recently The Way We Get By), Vickie Ramirez and Matthew Lopez (The Whipping Man). 

LaBute’s 10K  presents two joggers, a woman (Clea Alsip) and a man (J.J. Kandel), who are certainly among the fittest actors on a New York stage. Although they are jogging for almost the entire play, their bodies and their voices show no signs of fatigue. They meet on their daily run in a nature reserve and carry on a conversation that gradually grows more personal and leads them to reveal their fantasies. It’s a minor work that is superbly realized. The playwright directed.

Glenburn 12 WP by Ramirez is the evening’s weak point. Troy (Tre Davis), a young black man who has been at an anti-racism protest at Grand Central Terminal, enters a nearby Irish pub to have a beer. The bartender is unaccountably absent. He is soon joined by Roberta (Tanis Parenteau), a woman in her 30s who is a regular at the bar and who turns out to be part Native American. She tries to persuade him to have a drink, but he is reluctant to without the bartender there. She provokes him into a conversation and offers to pay for his drinks. When she goes down to the cellar allegedly to see if the bartender is there, she returns with a bottle of the very expensive Scotch for which the play is named. After a couple of drinks, she reveals a dark secret, which seemed completely implausible. The actors did their best with poorly written characters. Mel Haney directed.

The Sentinels by Lopez introduces us to three 9/11 widows whose husbands worked for the same firm and who meet at a coffee shop near ground zero every year. Alice’s (Meg Gibson) husband was the company’s founder. The acerbic Christa (Kellie Overbey) was married to an important executive there. Kelly’s (Michelle Beck) husband was a recent hire. Zuzanna Szadkowski is the waitress. The gimmick is that the story is told backwards starting in 2011 and proceeding in short scenes back to 2000. The concept is better than the execution. The short scenes don’t really build in intensity. The cast was good. The flatness seemed more in the writing than in Stephen Brackett’s direction.

Rebecca Lord-Surratt’s set design transformed nicely between locations. Dede Ayite’s costumes were apt. The evening was pleasant but not memorable. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes, no intermission.

The Way We Get By **

Neil LaBute’s new two-hander, now in previews at Second Stage, represents somewhat of a new direction for him — misogyny and misanthropy are nowhere to be seen and love is in the air. Doug (Thomas Sadoski) and Beth (Amanda Seyfried) have shared a night of lust after hooking up at a party. The morning after is awkward as they attempt to determine what the future holds for their relationship. We learn that they are not strangers and the nature of their past relationship presents an obstacle to any future one. A greater problem is the inability of one of them to commit. Doug, a socially awkward motor-mouth, would become annoying very fast if he were not played by the superb Sadoski, who, I think, is one of the finest younger actors on the New York stage. Seyfried has a less showy — dare I say underwritten — role. I felt that her inability to make a stronger impression was primarily a problem with the script. She does have lovely breasts though. I am curious whether Tatiana Maslany (“Orphan Black”), who was originally announced for the role, could have done more with it. Much of the dialogue seemed artificial. The play became repetitive after a while and ended with a ridiculous scene that diminished what preceded it. Neil Patel’s apartment set is spot-on as are Emily Rebholz’s costumes. Leigh Silverman’s direction does not call attention to itself. I admire LaBute for trying something different and thank him for providing a juicy role for Sadoski. Other than his performance, there wasn’t much to admire. Running time: 90 minutes, no intermission.

The Money Shot **

The poster for Neil LaBute’s new comedy, now in previews at MCC Theater, is doubly misleading: the four actors do not end up in bed together and Fred Weller does not have hair on his chest. The play raises the question of whether the world really needs another satirical look at the denizens of Hollywood. They are both too easy and too frequent a target, unless the playwright has some new insight to share. That is not the case here. Steve (Weller) is an obtuse 50-ish action film hero whose fight against Father Time has led him to marry Missy (Gia Crovatin), an ex-cheerleader and would-be actress less than half his age. Since Karen (Elizabeth Reaser) came out as a lesbian, her movie career has been on the skids, despite her attempts to pump it up with a cookbook, website, charitable activities and marketing ploys. Her lover Bev (Callie Thorne) is a film editor with a pugnacious personality, to put it mildly. Steve and Karen are currently filming a movie that they hope will revive their careers. The European director has suggested that they liven up an upcoming bedroom scene by actually having sex. The four are gathered at Karen’s luxurious home in the Hollywood hills the night before filming, allegedly to negotiate with their loved ones how far they are allowed to go in the shoot. However, it is more than an hour into the play before they finally get around to the matter at hand. The first hour is devoted to a series of arguments over such weighty questions as whether David Crosby is Bing’s son and whether Belgium is really part of Europe. By the time they get around to arguing over where tongues may or may not be placed during the shoot, we have realized that LaBute’s own tongue is planted firmly in his cheek. There are many amusing lines, but it all adds up to absolutely nothing. The actors give it their all. Weller, who was billed as Frederick in Mothers and Sons is listed here as Fred; I wish he had also shed the pinched voice that was so annoying in McNally’s play. Derek McLane’s set is lovely, Sarah J. Holden’s costumes are just right and Terry Kinney’s direction is fluid. Too bad they didn’t have something more substantive to work on. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes; no intermission.

Reasons To Be Happy ***

(Please click on the title to see the complete review.)
Neil LaBute's seriocomedy, now in previews at the Lucille Lortel Theatre in an MCC production, revisits the four characters he introduced in "reasons to be pretty" three years later. However, familiarity with the earlier play is by no means a requirement for this one. The four are working stiffs; many of the scenes take place in the break room of the plant where three of them are or have been employed. Greg (Josh Hamilton), the one who has finished college and aspires to be a teacher, is nonconfrontational and commitment-shy in the extreme. Carly (Leslie Bibb), the pretty one, is a security guard and single mom, recently divorced from Kent (Fred Weller), the macho jock with anger-management issues. Steph (Jenna Fischer) is the not-as-pretty hair stylist who, although now married, suddenly has renewed feelings for ex-boyfriend Greg as soon as he takes up with her close friend Carly. Complications ensue. LaBute is a master at creating pitch-perfect dialog for awkward situations that is funny, vulgar, yet wise. He seems to regard his blue-collar characters with a mixture of sympathy and condescension. Their life is governed by the harsh buzzer at the factory and even the buzzing device at the restaurant announcing that their table is ready. Except for Greg, they hold book learning in low regard. Watching these four bounce off each other may not lead to anything profound, but I found it highly entertaining. Hamilton perfectly captures Greg's tentativeness, but does not display the charm that would make it more plausible for the two women to be so attracted to him. Weller plays Kent almost as a caricature, but it works. Fischer has some fine moments and Bibb was consistently fine. Neil Patel's scenic design has the stage platform painted in diagonal yellow and black stripes like a loading platform; his break room at the plant nails every detail. Sarah J. Holden's costumes befit the characters. LaBute's direction is assured, but the play might have been tightened up a bit if it had the benefit of another director's views. Running time: two hours, 10 minutes including intermission.

Standing on Ceremony: The Gay Marriage Plays **

(Always click on the title to see the complete review!)
Over 90 minutes, nine playlets by eight playwrights examine various aspects of marriage equality. The actors read from scripts on music stands. As in any venture of this type, the results are uneven. Most successful are two hilarious works by Paul Rudnick featuring the irrepressible Harriet Harris: in one, she is a member of a dozen anti-same-sex marriage groups who is tormented by gay voices everywhere; in the other, she is a trendy liberal New York mother who is ashamed that her gay son isn't married yet. Richard Thomas is moving in Moises Kaufman's eulogy for a partner of 46 years. Neil LaBute's overlapping monologues for two men, played by Craig Bierko and Mark Sullivan (Mark Consuelos's understudy), is called "Strange Fruit." With that title, you know things won't end happily. The remaining works, by Jordan Harrison, Wendy MacLeod, Doug Wright, Mo Gaffney and Jose Rivera don't fare as well. It's a thankless task for any actress to share a stage with the likes of Ms. Harris, but Polly Draper and Beth Leavel do their best. Behind the actors, Sarah Zeitler fills the Minetta Lane stage with transparent chairs, flower arrangements and an enormous white swag passing through two interlocked rings, dramaticallly lit by Josh Starr. Stuart Ross directed. As I looked around at the audience, it was a clear case of preaching to the choir.